Full Nelson, No Regrets

An Age-Gap MM Wrestling Romance by Chase Power

Available at all major retailers

Pairing: MM

Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno

Tropes: Age Gap, Rivals to Lovers, Praise Kink, Secret Relationship, Forced Proximity, Grumpy/Sunshine, Touch Starved, Hurt/Comfort, Mentor/Mentee, Wrestling Romance

He called him a wasted talent. Then he called him something else entirely.

A flashy young professional wrestler ordered to train with the retired champion who publicly dismissed him discovers that the legend’s approval affects him far more deeply than their rehearsed holds ever should.

Nico Cruz has everything a professional wrestler needs to become a superstar: beauty, charisma, athleticism, and a talent for making an arena react before he even touches the ropes. What he doesn’t have is respect.

Grant Mercer spent twenty years as one of wrestling’s most feared champions. Now retired, openly gay, and determined never to become another bitter legend clinging to the spotlight, Grant agrees to return as a performance coach for one reason: the company wants him to transform Nico from a viral attraction into a credible main-event wrestler.

Nico remembers every interview in which Grant criticized him. Grant remembers every match in which Nico nearly proved him wrong.

Their first private training session becomes a battle. Their second becomes something much more dangerous. Soon the scripted rivalry they’re building for television is covering a private arrangement centered on control, trust, and the praise Nico has spent his entire career pretending he doesn’t need.

But when their secret relationship becomes useful to executives looking for a scandal, Grant must decide whether protecting Nico’s career means leaving him — or finally standing beside him where everyone can see.

You Will Love This If You Like:

✔️ Retired champion vs. flashy rising star — forced professional partnership
✔️ Scorching praise kink tied to genuine professional respect
✔️ Grumpy/sunshine with an 18-year age gap
✔️ Secret relationship under backstage scrutiny
✔️ He falls first (Grant) / he realizes it first (Nico)
✔️ Touch-starved older hero learning to be visible
✔️ Hurt/comfort after in-ring sabotage
✔️ An unscripted kiss in front of twenty thousand people
✔️ 85,000 words of scorching heat with a guaranteed HEA

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Content Warning: Full Nelson, No Regrets is a high-heat MM romance intended for adult readers (18+). It contains explicit, consensual sexual content between two adult men, an 18-year age gap, a coach/athlete power dynamic (with explicit consent discussions), praise kink, in-ring injury, backstage sabotage, a leaked photograph, closeted history, coming out, career pressure, media speculation, and a third-act separation. All intimacy is enthusiastically consensual. Guaranteed HEA.

📖 Read Chapter One Free

A flashy young wrestler meets the retired legend who called him a wasted talent. Their first training session is a fight. Their chemistry is worse. Start reading now.

Chapter One: Viral, Not Valuable

NICO

The top rope had no business feeling this good under my boots.

Fifteen thousand people screaming my name, the arena lights turning my gear into liquid gold, and one man flat on his back in the center of the ring waiting for me to finish him in a way that would trend on every platform before the replay even aired.

I wasn’t supposed to go to the top rope. The finish we’d called backstage was a ground-level pinfall — clean, safe, technically sound, the kind of ending that made coaches nod and fans politely applaud.

I didn’t become Nico Nova so people could politely applaud.

The corkscrew moonsault was beautiful. I knew it was beautiful because I’d drilled it six hundred times in an empty ring and another two hundred with a crash pad, and because beauty was the thing I understood better than anyone else in this company. The rotation was tight. The landing was precise — chest to chest, hook of the leg, shoulders pinned.

One. Two. Three.

The bell rang and the arena detonated and I rolled onto my back with my arms spread wide, letting the sound pour over me like a baptism.

My dressing room door closed behind me and I sat down on the folding chair and pressed my palms against my eyes hard enough to see colors.

Sloppy footwork. Telegraphed transitions. He’s an attraction. He’s not a wrestler.

My phone buzzed. Then again. Then continuously. A retired champion named Grant Mercer had told the world I didn’t respect the work. The clip was climbing past every moonsault I’d ever thrown.

“He’s talented enough. I’m not convinced he respects the work enough.”

I watched the clip three times. Studied his face for any sign that this was performance. But Grant Mercer hadn’t been a character in four years. What was left was a man who believed I was talented but not serious, gifted but not disciplined, an attraction but not a wrestler.

My father’s voice wearing Grant Mercer’s face. The same verdict in a deeper register.

Then Tasha King walked into my dressing room and changed everything.

“The company wants to build you toward a Kingmaker main event. There’s a condition. Grant Mercer has agreed to a three-month coaching contract.”

Monday. Seven a.m. Grant Mercer in a training ring, ready to confirm every suspicion I’d spent six years trying to outperform. I looked at myself in the mirror — gorgeous, unbothered, and entirely in on the joke. Underneath that, I was already memorizing his words.

Talented enough. Like that had ever been the problem.

The rivalry. The training. The tension that becomes something neither of them can control. Keep reading — Full Nelson, No Regrets is available now.

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